A grocery store is testing squishy robot hands to pack its bags

We're getting really close to completely automated deliveries. Ocado Technology, the research division of Ocado, a large UK online grocery delivery company, today showed off a robot concept that it has been working on with a range of European universities and Disney Research's Zurich office. The robot is essentially a soft, malleable hand attached to a relatively standard industrial robotic arm that can be used to grip produce without damaging it. The fingers and palm of the "soft hand", which was developed by the Technical University of Berlin, are pieces of expandable rubber that are controlled by forcing air through them. The hand can adjust its shape around the object it's gripping, allowing it to pick up small objects, like an apple, as well as larger objects, like a bag of limes. Ocado said in a blog post that it's still developing its idea--in the video, the bot was able to pick up the fruit in front of it (which was actually fake), but can't yet pick up the objects on its own.